ViciousXUSMC's Technology Database

I am going to have a field day posting up some pictures and videos of the new ATI Eyefinity technology.  I just recently got myself a ATI 5870 card and 3x Dell U2410 24″ 1920×1200 monitors.  So been playing games in a very awesome 5760×1200 resolution.  You have to see it in person to really understand how cool it is.

Nintendo and Sony have gone head to head with the PSP (Playstation Portable) and the Nintendo DS for several years and it is finally time for each company to reveal there new system hardware for 2009.

Previous advances have been made the PSP was re-released as the PSP Slim a nice big change for the PSP in size/weight and Nintendo created the DS Lite a smaller better version of the DS, the new generation however is not just a size change but a full on revamp of the systems and there hardware.

Nintendo already made the move with the DS-I (DSi), very similar to the current DS Lite the main changes are the slightly larger and much brighter screen, the LOSS of the GBA (Gameboy Advance) slot, 2 VGA quality cameras, and the addition of the SD Card slot. Honestly not a big difference and I think I would stick with the DS Lite however it at least keeps compatibility with all prior DS games and will have some new DSi only games to come in the near future.

You can expect to be able to use the SD card slot for simple multimedia like playing music or viewing pictures, the VGA camera will let you take pictures I am sure and will be part of the new DSi only games in the future.

Sony has not released there new PSP called the PSP Go. The PSP Go has undergone quite a large change, the UMD drive (Ultra Mini Disk) is completely gone! So all your old games will not play on here in disk format any longer, instead you must use the internal 16GB of flash memory. (Also can expand that with a M2 card to 32GB) so now all games must be acquired from the online playstation store. No word currently if there is a way to transfer your UMD games to the PSP Go or trade them in for credit.

Other major changes are the fact the unit is now much smaller and lighter, 16% lighter and 35%smaller than the PSP slim but also the screen size has been reduced. Wi-Fi is still here and they added bluetooth. Release is targeted for the beginning of October for the states.

The new PSP Go just doesnt seem as “serious” to me, more like a cellphone than a handheld gaming device, they even have plans for new “mini” games on the playstation store that are smaller/cheaper games that cant be called real full games, to me that sounds just like the kind of games you get on your cell phone.

I am not sure who is going to win the handheld console war this year but if I had to put my money on it I would side with Nintendo.

Here is an image of the two new consoles.

Most people these days have a digital life. Like your music, movies, pictures, games, and all other data. All that stuff that is on your computer.

Its important to you and you do not want to lose it. Also wouldn’t it be nice to be able to get to it at any time from anywhere? Example, Say you visit some out of town family you would be able to show them the pictures of your vacation from there home computer just by logging into your own personal server. That is a lot easier than printing out pictures, or e-mailing them.

Well those are the 2 main goals of having a WHS, its a nice user friendly system that specializes in automatically backing up your data from your computers, and also making it available to you online when your away from home.

Really that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what a WHS can do though.

A WHS can host a website/blog (I plan to host this site from mine when I build it), you can stream music/movies to your media extenders or other computer, It can even completely restore a computer for you if say your hard drive dies on your laptop, put a new hard drive in the laptop and use the WHS rescue boot disk and in no time your laptop will be exactly like it was again with all programs installed and all your data as if nothing ever happened. Best yet the server itself can protect its own data as long as you have more than one hard drive installed into it, so that if a drive dies you do not lose any of the data.

There are quite a few pre-built systems out there, the most popular being the HP Media Smart Server but as usual with the right know-how and skills you can build your own for cheaper and it will be more powerful.

Check out my shopping list of parts HERE

My current budget for this build is $0.00 this project has been on hold for budget reasons for well over a year, but I am hoping to find a way to start saving for it now and order the base parts while they are on sale. If you would like to help any site donations are going to this project. Since the server will host this site its still being donated to the site.

Once it is completed look forward to my WHS review and a nice list of my favorite plug-in’s and cool things you can do.

If you just got the game and noticed some lag in the online matches there is a very good chance its due to the games default setting of variable frame rate. You want your game and your opponents game to sync up so that one computer does not slow down to match the other.

To resolve this go into the game options and turn on Fixed Frame Rate. If you and your opponent do this it should fix the lag unless there is another issue in play like a bad internet connection.

Here is a little explanation of the problem from the SF4 forums.

Hopefully Capcom will patch the game to force fixed frame rate when gaming online, till then try to spread the word to everybody you know to turn it on.

Game on people, I’ll get online to play for the first time later today!

So while I was messing around with the infinity evolution points hack I decided to see if I could figure out infinity HP, and I did!

I cant really give an easy tutorial on how to do this one, the value is hard to find and it changes every time you play the game, but I think I may know how to make a program (trainer) to do the hard work for you. Will post back with updates on that.

For now check out the video!

Watch the HD Version HERE (Much higher quality, let it load for a bit before playing)

There actually is no cheat code in Prototype for infinity points or all upgrades, I am going to show you today how to cheat games that do not have cheat codes

I got bored point farming so I took the fast track to getting myself all the upgrades and I was nice enough to take the time to put together a very easy step by step guide on how I did it, so that you can do it also.

See the full guide HERE

The recent release of SF4 for the PC has gone well for most but there is a large crowd of people very displeased with the lack of keyboard support for 2 players.
If you think “thats not a big deal who would play with a keyboard and 2 people?”, then you don’t know about the home built arcade scene.

Many people build there own full blown authentic arcade cabinets at home, the vast majority of these use a hacked keyboard or a keyboard encoder to send the joystick & button signals to the computer. As emulators and things use keyboard input. Now with the lack of 2 player keyboard these people have a game they cant play on there arcade cabinets unless its 1 player only.

Currently the work arounds are: Use PPjoy a virtual joystick emulator to fool the game into thinking you have a gamepad but this method is complicated and does not work in a 64bit OS (So I cant use it), or be lucky enough to have a joystick or encoder that is used as a windows gamepad instead of a keyboard. (Perfect 360 Joystick or Cthulhu board)

Im not lucky enough to be able to use PPjoy as I use a 64bit OS, but I am lucky enough to have two Cthulhu boards that I used to hook my home made arcade into my Wii, so I will post back the results of making the adapter cables needed to hook it to my PC for some 2 player SF4 action.

The newest incarnation of the nostalgic 2d fighter classic is due out for PC on July 7th, you can drive down to your local store and hope to get a copy of it, or order it from a e-tailer if you want, but if you want it right away, and you want to save a few $$$ Steam has it for pre-order (Click Me) on digital download for 10% off, also there competing company Impulse is doing the same (Link Here).

Personally I am going to get it on Steam since I already have many games on there service and I like being able to download my game on multiple computers and play with no disk. Its nice when you want to revisit a game a year later and dont have a clue where the disk is, or if your not even at home you can just download it anywhere.

This is going to be a popular title and I already have a my home made joystick arcade setup to play it on so I have been looking forward to it.

While you wait the next 6.5 days why dont you go download the SF4 Benchmark Tool so you can both see how the game will look and how it will run on your system.

Enjoy and hope to beat you guys up online sometime later next week!

If your looking to get yourself the new iPhone 3G, you maybe at some point heard about an alternate model called the 3G S and wanted to know what it is.

Well its the same 3G design and core unit but with several internal upgrades, its going to cost you though as much as $200 more to get these extra features.

Basics
	iPhone 3G	iPhone 3G S
Price	$99 8GB ($299 for ineligible upgraders)	$199 16GB, $299 32GB ($399 and $499 for ineligible upgraders)
Processor	412MHz ARM 11	600MHz ARM 11
Graphics capability	OpenGL ES 1.1	OpenGL ES 2.0
Camera	2.0 megapixel fixed focus	3.0 megapixel autofocus with macro mode and auto white balance
Video recording	None	30fps VGA with on-device editing capability
Voice control	None	Dialing, music control
Nike+ support	No	Yes
Wireless technologies	3.6Mbps HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR	7.2Mbps HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
Water- and oil-resistant finish	No	Yes
Integrated magnetic compass	No	Yes
Included headphones	Standard	Inline remote for music control
Battery life	Up to 5 hours talk time / data on 3G, 10 hours on 2G Up to 6 hours data on WiFi Up to 24 hours audio Up to 7 hours video	Up to 5 hours talk time / data on 3G, 12 hours on 2G Up to 9 hours data on WiFi Up to 30 hours audio Up to 10 hours video
Dimensions	115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3mm	115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3mm
Weight	133 grams / 4.69 oz.	135 grams / 4.76 oz.

The Verdict?

Users have seen loading speeds in the area of 33% faster with the new faster cpu in the 3G S, that could be substantial when your looking at something that takes 20 seconds to load.

Many of the other additional features and upgrades will really increase the versatility and function of the phone in my opinion, so the 3G S gets my vote as the better model even at the higher cost, honestly Apple has great marketing, the 3G S should/could have been the 3G they just market two options so they can sell one as an upgrade, many of the features in the 3G S are standard in competing phones.

Photography is a hobby I see many people picking up, once your serious about the hobby you will one day find yourself with a DSLR. Making the choice in what DSLR to get is going to be tough, but once you do that, picking the lens’s for it is probably even tougher.

You can drop some serious money on lens’s anywhere from $200 to over $2000 so I went out there and did the research on what lens is going to do the most for me, and do it cheap.

This lens the Sigma 18-200mm OS was the answer.

Here is why:
First of all its a quality lens, Sigma is a good brand and all but the most stuck up brand fanboys will agree that 3rd party lens’s like Sigma and Tameron can be on par with there more expensive Cannon & Nikkor counter parts.

Second was the cost, I got mine off ebay for about $300 but they can be had in e-tail stores for about $400 (if you want a deal and cant find it, just email me and I can help) in the DSLR lens world this is a very cheap price for a quality lens.

Third and I think most important is versatility. No matter how good your camera is or your lens if you cant take a picture the picture is worthless to you. Taking pictures in a studio is one thing where your shots are planned and you can change a lens when needed to go from a telephoto to a wide angle, but for going out there in the real world and taking pictures of what you see, your subject is randomly close to you or far away.

With a zoom range from 18mm (very wide) to 200mm (semi long) you can have just this one lens and walk around all day with it and never need to change lens’s, this is invaluable to me. I both dont want to carry around other lens’s and I dont want to miss a shot because I dont have the right lens on my camera at the time.

In a photo forum you may find a lens like this referred to as the perfect “Disney Land” lens, as thats the kind of environment many people would like to use this in.

The OS stands for Optical Stabilization, its Sigmas version of Nikkors VR (Vibration Reduction) this just means when shooting with the camera in your hands instead of a tripod the small vibrations that cause blur in a photo are compensated for. This means many many more of your pictures will come out looking perfect. You can get the non OS version of this lens for cheaper but this is a feature I think is worth paying for.

I have had this lens on my Nikkon D70 for about a half year now and it has not dissapointed. If you would like to see some of the pictures this lens can take I have many posted in my online photo album.

Check out the Tampa Renaissance Festival HERE
and HERE is Tampa Bush Gardens.

All of these photo’s are right off the camera with no post processing and all taken with the Sigma.